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Bridging Global Customer Experience to Business Strategy

80% of companies believe their customer experience is superior. Yet only 8% of customers agreed with this statement according to a recent Bain study. This presentation delivered at World Trade Day in Denver discusses the reasons that there exists such a disconnect between businesses and customers. Using online engagement as an example, the presentation will show how multilingual big-data can pose challenges to those who are doing the analysis. The presentation will also show how social intelligence, translation technology, and human linguists can work together to attain deeper insight into the global customer's experience and thereby drive greater revenue from global customerbases.

My name is Liesl Leary and I’m the director of marketing for the Americas region for SDL Global Solutions, which is headquartered in Superior, Colorado. I began with this video because most people have never heard of SDL, even though you most certainly have heard of the companies we work with to manage their customer’s experiences.

What I’m going to going to talk about today is how big data, technology, and language is converging and the challenges that presents to global organizations. As you can see from this statistic I got from Bain and Company: 80% of companies believe their customer experience is superior. Clearly, this is delusional because only 8% of customer surveyed agreed.

Why is there such a huge disconnect between what we believe to be a superior customer experience and what customers perceive? I’m going to take a poll of the room. I want you to clap if you think it’s one of these things. Thank you for participating in my experiment here. We’re going to get back to this question in a minute.

In the meantime, let’s walk through how one brand in particular engaged with their customers via social media. Audience, meet Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique and Bistro. For those of you haven’t seen this yet on Buzzfeed, Amy’s restaurant was recently featured on Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen Nightmares. And customers began to respond and engage in a way they had never done before.

As customers began posting on their Facebook page, Amy began posting back.

And they tried to take control of their social media presence.

Engagement was so successful, that Reddit reposted their Facebook page.

Which drove even more traffic and engagement.

The data will tell you that from a social media perspective, this was the most successful viral social campaign that ever happened for this company. Brand awareness is most definitely through the roof and engagement was high.

But I want to ask you, does this data map to business objectives? Clap, if you think it does.

Thank you for clapping. I’m asking you to clap a lot in this presentation. Clapping is the big data of the ancient world. Why do we clap? We clap because something is cool. We clap because we feel that we have to defend our beliefs, our choices, our souls. We clap because something is totally awesome and unexpected. We clap because we agree or disagree with what is being said.And you can derive insight from applause in the same way the senators in ancient Rome did. Just by judging the noise in the room, it’s pretty clear that no one thinks that Amy’s Baking Company Bistro and Boutique’s social data is mapping to their business objectives. Unless of course, their objective is to get everyone to mock them.

In the modern world, a like, a share, a retweet, a reblog is a clap. Whenever we friend or follow, plus 1 something or link-in, we’re applauding and creating one of the largest unstructured data sets ever imagined.

Combined with this explosion of Big Data are Big Language Challenges. Here are a few facts from IBM that should give you an idea of the complexity of coaxing meaningful insight from a multilingual big-data set. 7 billion people in the world, 2 billion of which are on the internet6,000 recorded languages80% of the people on the internet have a first language other than English2.5 quintillion bytes of data

And this is hurting business by putting companies at a competitive disadvantage, missing deals, and losing customers. You might be tempted to think at this point that language barriers are the reason for the disconnect about global customer experience. But you would be wrong.

We feel it’s all three and we have developed a portfolio of solutions to optimize global customer experiences because the reality is that all 3 components are critical in managing a global customer experience.

We talk about Big Data in global business as though language was irrelevant. Imagine looking at the discussion regarding Amy’s bakery if the conversation was happening in another language. If all you had to look at was the data, would you make the right business decisions regarding your global customers? We believe that global business will need to leverage big data in order to create the insight to understand what customers want. But to truly understand the why’s and not just the how many’s, technology will be needed to orchestrate how data is translated and filtered for meaning. Finally, to optimize a customer’s journey, the experience must be personalized for the individual customer in their language and preferences.

The key question is do you measure behaviors that map to your business objectives or are you just administering data? We have developed three key measures that map to business objectives. Your ideal customer is one that is going shop, share their experience, and ultimately be an advocate for your product. By applying our proprietary algorithms to the online conversations going on, we are able to predict a customers likelihood to buy a product, share their experience, and their level of emotional engagement with your brand. And, far more importantly, we can do it in multiple languages.

And we’re able to do it in multiple languages and markets because of our language platform. The SDL language platform provides flexible technology and services to match the right translation option with the right business need which is ever changing. Your marketing content might need human translators to the right jist and meaning, but your digital artifacts do not. In the case of the previous KPI’s, machine translation is often good enough to get context for what conversations are saying.

Here’s an example of how we use this combination of technologies to drive more efficiency in making global business decisions. We were able to advise Barnes and Noble who wanted a strategy to take the Nook global. In looking at social media conversations related to tablets across the globe, we were able to hone in on markets ready and open to a new device. Converting shoppers ready to purchase in these markets would require a campaign promoting the device through the use of well-structured, localized language messaging and content for each. What customers say they do in the social sphere accurately predicts their behavior in the real world. Their online activities and conversations illustrate in real-time what matters the most to them. We model these unstructured conversations and provide dashboards to our customers that tell them a lot about their shopper’s customer experience. In this case, we just did it for Germany and France. Take a look at these charts. In germany, sentiment is only going up for ereaders, people like them. In France, you see a dip that never recovers. Since these points are based on data, we were able to look at this period in the dataset in language and understand what happened. In France, a failed launch of the eReader led to major criticisms that dominated the conversations. Therefore, eReaders as a whole group haven’t really recovered. What we were able to do here is recommend that the customer spend more budget in Germany versus France. Or, that the messaging needs to change for France in order to persuade potential buyers to give an eReader a second chance.

We’ve been able to answer these questions for tequila, for medical companies who need to map their patient journeys for better messaging opportunities.What Markets present the biggest opportunities? What messages will resonate? What defines Exceptional Global Customer Experiences? What are my competitions strengths and weaknesses? How can we differentiate ourselves globally? These are all questions we have answered in one way or another for our customerIt’s not about knowing the “how many” but the why that can impact business decisions and strategy when it comes to global trade.s.

You can aggregate all the data you want, but without a linguistic resource or machine translation to provide context, data is just data. Hopefully, what I’ve shown you today is that is possible to understand your global customers as well as you understand your domestic ones. The really important information that can help you make better business decisions, better translations, is lost in translation simply because there is so much to translate, where do you even begin? Thankfully, machine translation can quickly expedite the process for discerning which information is relevant and which information is not. Linguists can than translate professionally any artifact that supports the general conclusions we’ve uncovered from the data.

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Why is there such a disconnect about the global customerexperience?Lack of Data?TooComplicated?LanguageBarrier?“80% of Companies Believe Their Customer Experience isSuperior. Only 8% of customers surveyed agreed”Source: Bain and Company Survey

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9,000 Shares of the Reddit article47,000 likesPeople are engaged and sharing your contentBrand awareness is through the roofNumber of shares of posts at an all time highTraffic is soaringCustomers are respondingCongratulations, you got on BuzzFeedand Reddit!What the Data will tell you

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Big Language™ Challenges14There are 7 billion people in the world –2 billion of which are on the Internet.There are more than 6,000 recordedlanguages.Only 20% of Internet users speak and readEnglish as their first language.2.5 quintillion bytes of data exist today, moston the web – 90% of that was generatedin the last two years alone.Source: IBM

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Why is there such a disconnect about the global customerexperience?Lack of Data?TooComplicated?LanguageBarrier?“80% of Companies Believe Their Customer Experience isSuperior. Only 8% of customers surveyed agreed”Source: Bain and Company Survey

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How can we help drive insight in entering new markets20eReader: Global PCSeReader: Germany PCSeReader: France PCSeReader PCS 02/12 PCS 03/12 PCS % ChangeGlobal view 38.25 36.73 -4.0%US 37.21 34.95 -6.10%Germany 69.39 70.48 1.6%France 11.52 21.27 84.6%INSIGHT 1: Intention to purchase the eReader inGermany is far greater than in France or the USOPPORTUNITY: Use of offers and campaign messagesto push people to take the final step. Prioritise ‘Sales’promotion content in this market to support launch.INSIGHT 2: The French market is unforgiving – theeReader did not live up to launch expectations with O/Sbugs and usability criticisms dominating conversations.Interest in the device has not recoveredOPPORTUNITY: Campaign has to focus on persuasivelanguage, reassuring language and proof points thatthey are able to exercise. Nook could effectively positionagainst the eReader in this market and could be apriority opportunity for launchCCF Scores provide customersdata-backed insight to makebetter business decisions ofwhich market to enter firstShows the competition’sweaknessesCCF Scores suggestsmessaging opportunities for abetter customer experience inglobal market placesShows a path for differentiatingtheir product in the globalmarket place

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Why is there such a disconnect about the global customerexperience?Lack of Data?TooComplicated?LanguageBarrier?“80% of Companies Believe Their Customer Experience isSuperior. Only 8% of customers surveyed agreed”Source: Bain and Company Survey